Quotes About Evolution

Evolutionary tortoises nonetheless do more genetic mixing than evolutionary hares. Austin Burt's discovery of a correlation between generation length and amount of recombination is evidence of the Red Queen at work. The longer your generation time, the more genetic mixing you need to combat your parasites.

The genome is littered, one might almost say clogged, with the equivalent of computer viruses, selfish, parasitic stretches of letters which exist for the pure and simple reason that they are good at getting themselves duplicated.

What is it about human beings that enables them to keep changing their lives in this tumultuous way?

That is what I mean by collective intelligence. No single person knows how to make a computer mouse. The person who assembled it in the factory did not know how to drill the oil well from which the plastic came, or vice versa. At some point, human intelligence became collective and cumulative in a way that happened to no other animal.

Sexual relations are driven not by what is good, in evolutionary terms, for men or for women, but for their chromosomes. The ability to seduce a woman was good for Y chromosomes in the past; the ability to resist seduction by a man was good for X chromosomes in the past.

Different versions of genes rise and fall in popularity driven often by the rise and fall of diseases. There is a regrettable human tendency to exaggerate stability, to believe in equilibrium.

The common analogy for what Williams was describing is a lottery. Breeding asexually is like having lots of lottery tickets all with the same number. To stand a chance of winning the lottery, you need lots of different tickets. Therefore, sex is useful to the individual rather than the species when the offspring are likely to face changed or unusual conditions.

Besides, a million years of natural selection shaped human nature to be ambitious to rear successful children, not to settle for contentment: people are programmed to desire, not to appreciate.

For instance, given the choice between a safe, comfortable and long life for the individual or a risky, tiring and dangerous attempt to breed, virtually all animals (and indeed plants) choose the latter.

Indeed, their bodies are designed with planned obsolescence called ageing that causes them to decay after they reach breeding age – or, in the case of squid or Pacific salmon, to die at once. None of this makes any sense unless you view the body as a vehicle for the genes, as a tool used by genes in their competition to perpetuate themselves. The body's survival is secondary to the goal of

As Heraclitus put it, 'Nothing endures but change.

If culture consisted simply of learning habits from others, it would soon stagnate. For culture to turn cumulative, ideas needed to meet and mate.

Male gorillas monopolise their mates, so their sperm meets no competitors; male chimpanzees share their mates, so each needs to produce large quantities of sperm and mate frequently to increase his chances of being the father. It also explains why male birds sing so hard when already 'married'. They are looking for 'affairs'.

Depending on whose estimate you choose, and how you correct for inflation, the average person alive in the world today earns in a year between ten and twenty times as much money, in real terms, as the average person earned in 1800. Or rather, he or she can afford ten or twenty times as many goods or services.

Letting good evolve, while doing bad, has been the dominant theme of history. That is why the news is full of only bad things being done, but we find when they are over that great good has happened unheralded. Good things are gradual; bad things are sudden. Above all, good things evolve.

Again and again, we have told ourselves that there is a top–down description of the world, and a top–down prescription by which we should live.

there is no end or purpose to existence, only ceaseless creation and destruction, governed entirely by chance.

the universe was not created for or about human beings, that we are not special, and there was no Golden Age of tranquillity and plenty in the distant past, but only a primitive battle for survival.

The sex that invests most in rearing the young—by carrying a fetus for nine months in its belly, for example—is the sex that makes the least profit from an extra mating. The sex that invests the least has time to spare to seek other mates. Therefore, broadly speaking, males invest less and seek quantity of mates, while females invest more and seek quality of mates.

Grant, then, that men prefer women with relatively wide hips and large breasts. That still does not explain the gaining of fat on breasts and hips; fat breasts do not produce more milk than lean ones of the same size, and fat hips are no further apart than lean ones of the same bone structure. Low thinks women who gained fat in those places may have deceived men into thinking they had milk-full breasts and wide hip-bones. Men fell for it

There is no permanent ideal of disease resistance, merely the shifting sands of impermanent obsolescence.

Exchange is to technology as sex is to evolution. It stimulates novelty

The story of a briefly abundant hairless primate originating in Africa is but a footnote in the history of life, but in the history of the hairless primate it is central.

Man with all his noble qualities still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin.